6 Tips to Improve Call Quality Monitoring

Call quality monitoring is essential to the efficiency of a contact center. Given the high volume of customer service interactions on any given day, it’s critical to establish methods for analyzing and implementing best practices to both improve areas that need work and acknowledge the methods that are working well. Here are six essential tips for improving call quality monitoring practices for better customer service.

Analyze all calls—not just a sample. In order to fully understand service interactions, it’s important to closely monitor all the calls recorded and not just a random sample. Analyzing just a few randomly selected calls will not provide substantial data or provide an in-depth view of agents’ performance over time. By using a speech analytics system that records all calls and monitors call quality in real-time, managers may gain a comprehensive view of these calls to better train agents and implement strategies for improved customer service.

Look at the metrics, but don’t forget the customer’s needs. Analyzing average call handling time is important for efficient customer service. However, many contact centers place too much emphasis on this metric, believing a quick call resolution to be a priority as it allows agents to move faster to the next customer in the queue. Agents should be careful to never undermine call quality and take the time to resolve an issue in order to prevent a customer from having to call back or reach out to the company on yet another channel. For this reason, it’s important to analyze the quality of individual agents’ interactions with customers, as it may be that agents with longer average handling times may be making a strong effort to resolve an issue and thus making gains toward brand loyalty and customer retention.

Assign roles to a quality monitoring team. To be truly consistent, contact centers should designate a person or better yet, a team, for call quality monitoring. This way, supervisors can use their time to manage and support agents while allowing a designated team to monitor and evaluate calls and ultimately determine the training needs of the staff as necessary.

Identify good examples of “best practice” calls for training purposes. If a specific call stands out as a “best practice” interaction, be sure to present it during training. Such calls might feature such positive aspects as a relaxed and friendly yet knowledgeable agent who handles and resolves a difficult customer situation. Sharing best practices is great for team building and also recognizing individual success, and rewarding agents for their skills is excellent for motivation and making them feel vital to the contact center.

Involve agents in the evaluation process. Asking agents to give their feedback regarding practices that work well for them, communicating concerns they may have about customer service calls, or offering suggestions for revising call scripts can help contact center managers gain a broader view of how calls can be better monitored for quality. In addition, when preparing evaluations of agents during the monitoring process, managers should explain expectations to agents beforehand so that they know what kind of behavior they should be striving for. Is it a priority to achieve first contact resolution? Should the agent always verbalize to a customer that there will be a follow-up call once a case is closed? Keeping agents informed allows them to perform at their best with a clear focus on a company’s customer service priorities.

Give agents proper training. To deliver their best, agents need to be trained and coached properly. Providing agents with tools for success such as call scripts for consistent quality, behavioral training and roleplaying for better interactions with customers, video tutorials, and updated information about company products and services are all key to giving them the knowledge and confidence they need to deliver quality customer service experiences.